What is a Baptist? Soul Freedom
Our second distinctive Baptist belief is in soul freedom - this is the affirmation that each person has the right and responsibility to deal personally with God without the imposition of creed, clergy, or civil government.
Here is an example of soul freedom in action. Two pairs of friends just got engaged to each other. At least one person in each of these relationships work in Baptist churches. Both couples are preparing to move in with each other. One friend told me that he and his fiancé were not planning on getting married until next year, and that their living arrangement had come into question at the church where he works. He and his fiancé had given a great deal of thought and consideration to their moving in together - they’d prayed about it and felt as if moving in before marriage was the right choice for them.
The other couple, however, had also given a great deal of thought and consideration into moving in together before their wedding. After praying about it, they decided that they felt as though what was right for them was to go ahead and take all the legal actions necessary for marriage, while still waiting on an actual wedding ceremony.
These two pairs of friends faced the exact same dilemma, took the exact same approach (ie: prayer) and arrived at the exact opposite conclusions. What does this mean? It means that both sets of friends exercised their right to soul freedom and have dealt personally with God and felt called by God in different directions. It isn’t up to any creed or clergy member to decide which couple handled this situation rightly or wrongly - it’s simply between them and God.
“No one is forced to believe because no one can be forced to believe… to try to make someone believe what they honestly cannot believe exploits both the individual and the biblical meaning of faith.”
Baptists believe and affirm that we were all created in the image of God - and that includes having the capacity to make moral, spiritual, and religious decisions for ourselves. Our response to Jesus is personal. Our faith is our own. No one can believe or have faith for us - it simply doesn’t work that way.
Walter B. Shurden, author of The Baptist Identity, makes a few really good points about Soul Freedom. First, he states that Soul Freedom really just means the right to choose - “faith is voluntary,” he says “no one is forced to believe because no one can be forced to believe… to try to make someone believe what they honestly cannot believe exploits both the individual and the biblical meaning of faith.”
Shurden writes that our Baptist founders wanted freedom from state-enforced religion because “they thought that the freedom of the human spirit was worth saving. They rebelled against the priority of institutionalism because they believed that the priority of the individual was worth saving.”
It seems to be a trend lately, that so many of us will do almost anything to avoid responsibility for our own lives - we will let others choose for us, let others speak for us. But when it comes to faith, we are the only ones who can be responsible, and when it comes to the motives of our hearts, God is the only one who counts.
